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January 23, 2005
Jesus Christ—of the same essence of the Father
Jesus Christ—of the same essence of the Father
Isaiah 35: 1-4 / John 14: 8-11
January 23rd, 2005
This past week President Bush took his oath of office for a second term. Part of the interest of this was seeing his dad in the background. Because his father was also a president we cannot help comparing them.
We call a boy “a chip off the old block,” meaning he sure reminds us of his dad. I have a niece who is so much like her mother—a mother we all love to bits that we eagerly look forward to the kind of woman she will become. But there is an ebb and flow from one generation to the next. As Samuel Butler remarked quaintly in his novel, The Way of All Flesh,
We are as days and have had our parents for our yesterdays, but through all the fair weather of a clear parental sky the eye of Fortune can discern the coming storm, and she laughs as she places her favourites it may be in a London alley or those whom she is resolved to ruin in king's palaces.
While we are all interested in this kind of thing as we watch the generations unfold, there’s not a lot at stake in what we discover.
Now I have a point in all this talk about parents and children. And it goes beyond encouraging all us parents to live well before our children. The Bible tells us that Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Jesus is “the author and finisher of our faith.” That means Jesus was the model that we look at and He and the Father were one.
Jesus was not just a man who lived an exemplary life. Jesus was also God. Even though Jesus was God made flesh, He prayed to One whom He called, “Father.” In fact, Jesus called this One to whom He prayed, “Abba,” which was an intimate term like our term “Daddy.” What was the relationship between Jesus and this One to whom He prayed? Jesus said to His disciple, Philip, “The one who has seen me has seen the Father.”
This morning I want to speak to the question of the relationship between Jesus, who was God the Son, to the One to whom He prayed, to God the Father.
What does it matter to understand this, you may wonder. Is this just another word-game? Or does it matter for some practical reason? I believe it matters for very practical reasons.
First, perhaps is that to think about this is to elevate our minds and hearts simply by focusing on Jesus. If all you and I think about is the day to day grind of life, stuff about home, about work, about money, about sports, about our health, about who said what to whom, about what we’re going to do when we grow up or retire, or the like, then our lives will focus only on our own little world. And you and I are reduced as people. We become small.
We become larger by thinking of Jesus. It’s part of loving God to think about Jesus. We become in some small way consciously a part of God’s enterprise when we expose our minds deliberately to God.
But there is more to thinking about Jesus than this. I use the name Jesus and God interchangeably on purpose. Our faith needs to know it has a sure anchor in truth. Truth may not be entirely within our grasp when it comes to matters about God, that is, God is much greater than we can understand. But what we do understand we want to be true. And we have to work to try to understand what is true about the big stuff.
The reason why Sunday School matters, why such activities as Confirmation class for young people matters, and why Inquirer’s Class for membership matters, and Bible studies matter is that we are training our minds to think about the “big stuff.” It’s not beside the point that we also get to know and care for each other.
A day is coming to each of us when it will be clear that it has never really mattered what kind of house we live in, or how large or small our financial resources are, or what our education is, or whether the Boilermakers are winning or not.
Every now and then we come to moments when there flashes before us that we’re playing in a much bigger arena than the little world of every day life in West Lafayette, Indiana. This week I met a man I’d not seen in a while. He looked strangely different. I asked him what it was. He told me he had only a few months to live. He asked me to pray for him. Or perhaps you are driving along and you realize you’re about to be hit by another car, and thought flashes before you, “I might be in tomorrow’s obituary.”
When two jet airliners plunged into the twin towers of the World Trade Center four years ago, suddenly a lot of self-confident people felt very vulnerable. I used to think 911 was a number that represented help in time of emergency need. Now I think of it as a number spelling “how totally vulnerable the strongest nation in the world is.”
When safety is no longer possible, what lies beyond the present life? We need to feel that our faith is anchored in truth and not in some fashionable religion. I’m convinced that what we “know” about Jesus is influenced by what we “feel” as well as by the ideas we think. And what we feel is nurtured by coming together often to study together the great matters. And Jesus Christ is the greatest subject we can study together. I am fortified in what I feel by seeing the deep interest of others in the group with which I meet on Wednesday evenings. I am fortified in my faith by being in the presence of those I get to pray with on Wednesday morning. The feelings we have help us to appropriate the big stuff. Our feeling of trust in God grows in community.
So what about Jesus, God the Son, and God the Father?
When Jesus was born and lived out His brief life here, the Bible teaches us “in Him dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.” This means that Jesus was all that God is. God became a human being for a reason: in order to rescue us from a terrible predicament, the predicament of sin—the human blemish that is a fatal flaw. Sin wrecks everything. Sin makes ugly what is beautiful. Sin ruins friendships. It destroys trust between people. Sin pollutes personality. Sin is a principle of corruption that sours the sweetness of life. Sin isn’t fun at all. Sin is total yuk.
The Apostle Paul told us, “He became sin for us who knew no sin that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” This seems impossible, but it is true.
It was obvious to those who saw Him that Jesus was a man. It gradually dawned on those who saw Him that something was going on in Jesus that defied definition. Jesus’ disciple, Phillip, said to Him, “Lord, show us the Father and we shall be satisfied.” Jesus replied, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”
Phillip and others who cared about these things knew about God the Father only in bits and pieces. Israel in Moses’ day saw the lightning and thunder and dark clouds surrounding Mt. Sinai when God spoke to Israel the Ten Commandments. They saw the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night that led them through the wilderness. They knew this meant God was with them. Phillip knew about all of this from his Bible.
In Exodus 24: 10 we even read that Moses, Aaron, and seventy elders of Israel saw the God of Israel.
Later on we read that Moses set up the Tabernacle outside the camp of Israel in the wilderness. The people saw a pillar of cloud standing at the door of the tabernacle. People would kneel at the opening of their own tents and look at that distant tent where Moses met with God. We read: “Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face as a man speaks to a friend.” It is a strange and awesome passage. Moses actually says to God, “You have found favor in my sight.” What an odd thing for a man to say to God, “You’re doing OK, God.”
Moses then asked God to go with them. “Is it not in thy going with us, so that we are distinct, I and thy people, from all other people that are upon the face of the earth? God was with them, but they could not identify with God personally.
Four hundred years later the prophet Isaiah told Moses’ descendants who were clutching for survival, “Behold your God will come and save you.” You and I read this and think this means something like “God will take care of you.” But when Jesus lived those thirty or so remarkable years here, there were those who realized that what Isaiah wrote was no remark about God’s general care. “God will come,” meant just that. God would show up.
People in Jesus’ day knew the rest of the passage from Isaiah from which we read the first few words this morning. It went on to say, “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a hart, and the tongue of the dumb will sing for joy.”
They had seen Jesus literally open the eyes of blind people. They watched as he fixed the ears of someone that didn’t hear. They heard Jesus tell a man crippled from birth, “Get up and walk.” He did every detail of these words from the prophet Isaiah—which the prophet said after saying, “Your God will come and save you.”
How was this Jesus one with the God mentioned in the Old Testament, the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
At the Counsel of Nicea in AD 325 they debated this question because an elder from the church in Alexandria was teaching that Jesus, though divine, that is, God-like in some uncanny way, was only a man. Jesus had a beginning like every other person had a beginning. “There was when He was not,” this man said boldly. His name was Arius.
Arius taught before Jesus was born he did not exist as God the Son.
When we say Jesus was the only begotten Son of the Father we’re talking about a relationship unlike the earthly relationship between fathers and sons. Arius taught that the Son was not only subordinate in function—as Jesus told us, but that He came into existence at the will of the Father, just as every child is the result of an act of the parents. Jesus was not the eternal God born to human mother.
Arius didn’t talk about this over coffee in private conversations with friends as some of us might discuss a big theological problem. He taught it boldly, even arrogantly. Arius had an aggressive personality. He is an example of how to think badly, without submission, without listening. He showed us how NOT to discuss great matters. How we listen is as important as how we speak. Attitude matters in how we talk of God.
In the debate that followed in the Council nearly everyone realized there was something fundamentally wrong with Arius’ position. If Jesus said, “I and my Father are one,” then what described the Father also described the Son. Since the Father was eternal, the Son too was eternal. Isaiah had given among the names of this Son who would be given, “everlasting father.” “He was in the beginning with God and was God,” as John’s Gospel put it.
This was hard to understand. Some said Jesus was like the Father, not the same. But others remembered Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” This meant that they were not just alike, but “the same.”
In the end when they voted, the only way to settle the problem, the majority realized that to say the Son was only of “like” the Father could be interpreted to mean there was only seeming unity in the Godhead. But Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” This doesn’t mean that the Father is the Son. It means, as Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Of Jesus, the Son, it was said as it was said of God the Father, “He was full of grace and truth.”
So what? you ask. So everything. Because Jesus was actually God, He represented the deepest investment in humanity that our Creator could make. When God became man we see in Jesus God’s idea of humanity, image of God reflects on God. Our idea of humanity is a flawed idea. Our ideas from watching each other allow us a lot of slack that messes things up for us. We copy flawed models. Study Jesus, God made flesh.
I have tried to understand with you today the truth that what God is, Jesus is. If you and I will study Jesus we will come to know God better—the God who loves us, before whom we live every day, and before whom we will all stand one day. It matters then, to ask not only what is God like, but how can I come to be more like His Son, Jesus—so that when we stand before God, as we all will, God the Father will recognize in us the ways of the family of God.
I urge you all to study Jesus together. It will strengthen your feelings that help you appropriate the truth that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. If we study God we will come to know Him, and thus become our God-designed selves. Jesus said, “The one who has seen me has seen the Father.” And He gave us the challenge, “Let it be that when people see you, they see me.” We can become God’s message of hope and in the process find hope ourselves.
Let us pray: Heavenly Father, we think you for showing us what you are in showing us Jesus. Help us to know Him. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at January 23, 2005 09:30 AM